Large scale surveys of the universe are quickly becoming key to making new discoveries at the cutting edge of astronomy. Case in point is the Cosmic Evolution Survey (or COSMOS), which incorporates data from 446,000 galaxies.

Today we're joined at The Star Spot by Ludovic Van Waerbeke whose survey-based research has helped us expand our understanding of the expanding - and accelerating - universe, confirming the existence of an unknown source of energy, or dark energy, and providing a map of the large scale dark matter distribution of the cosmos.

About Our Guest

Ludovic Van Waerbeke is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia and Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Cosmology and Gravity program.

Is our solar system unique? That's becoming a major question for researchers. It turns out solar system formation is a far more complex process than anyone imagined. Gas giants migrate in and out. Planets swap places with each other. And bodies of all shapes and sizes appear at every conceivable distance from their star. To make sense of what might literally be a chaotic system today I’m joined at The Star Spot by Aaron Boley, Canada Research Chair in Planetary Astronomy.

Current in Space

About Our Guest

Aaron Boley is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Planetary Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. He studied at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Switzerland before holding a Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Florida. Boley is a frequent guest at public science events, having presented to Café Scientifique, Vancouver’s VanCityBuzz and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.